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Not long ago a Dutch woman wrote me about a book she is writing, in which she interviews women named Sophie (Greek for wisdom), asking, What is Wisdom? And, Given your name, Have you thought about Wisdom?
I won’t tell you my answer to her question. I gave one. But I’m interested in what others think.

Tell me, What is Wisdom? I’ll collect the answers from all you non-sophies and post them here. And maybe I’ll divulge my answer as well.

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Available on Amazon, through Finishing Line Press, FLPbookstore@aol.com at bookstores, or from Me, autographed!

I’m so happy, I’m wagging my tail. For me, Poetry comes right after music on the stairwell of ART, with music is at the TOP. Imagine! A publisher wanted my poems!

Would you like to read on or two? Scroll down. I’ll give you 3 (just after these flattering blurbs). They are all vastly different, but all about Love-struck. Even if you don’t buy, please write a review for Amazon. If I get 50 reviews, Amazon kicks the book up in its advertising.

PRAISE FOR FALLING: LOVE-STRUCK

Sophy Burnham has given us a collection of poems to read under the eyes of God.

Her words teach us to breathe and how to catch our breath. Her poetry tells us to stop and enjoy the miraculous. Burnham makes us think of Bly and all those writers who love nature. Come listen to the ringing of her soul. There are beautiful dreams giving birth in these poems.

The voice in this poem speaks out of the wisdom of a life lived passionately and consciously in the body, a voice in love with the world, attuned to loss and woundedness, open to relationships – from lovers to granddaughters – and animated by the childlike wonder of a true mystic. To read these poems is to fall in love again – with the earth, with our fragile and beautiful humanness, with words and yes, with the lively mystery that some of us call “God.”

Kathleen Henderson Staudt, author of Waving Back: Poems of Mothering Life and Annunciations: Poems out of Scripture.

It’s so hard to choose only TWO POEMS out of almost 40, but if you like them, please buy my book. And review it on Amazon (because it really makes a difference. If I can get 50 reviews, Amazon starts advertising the book).

The basement stair

There was a day when I, a little child,

Was dancing in the sunbeam’s shaft that filed

Or streamed across the chambered hallways of my mind

(I was all joy; no worlds were left to find)

And, laughing, whirled in rhythm with the luminous floats—

The spirit lights like golden notes

Singing in the high air.

“What are you doing on the basement stair?”

It was my mother’s voice. “How dare you? Just in underpants

And playing in the dust! You feel enhanced,

I s’pose, to be here smeared in dirt!”

She muttered more. I rose protesting pride against my hurt,

And still she would not stop. “I’ve never seen the like!”

I felt tears back against the dike

Of my control, then overflow, broken on her reproof.

I dressed. She stood aloof.

And then I saw the lights were only motes

Gray dirt or grime against the cellar door, the kind of grit that floats

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Just this week, I received a wonderful story to share: a car, an 18-wheeler, an accident–and then what? I remember getting two letters once from two different people who each recounted the same story–of a car that against all the laws of physics passed through another so that though they saw the faces in the other car as it shifted through their front seat, averting a crash.

For days this letter from Victoria (a stranger to me) has made me happy, and I’m glad she says I can post it. I can’t do better than quote from her letter to me.

At 17, I was diagnosed with a severe panic disorder. I had my first panic attack while driving a car, and I began to fear driving so much that having a panic attack when behind the wheel became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I went through years of therapy before learning how to deal with it. I am 41 now, and always have a small fear in the back of my mind when driving, though I know to reverse the symptoms of a panic attack if needed.

On May 20, 2016 I drove my son an hour and a half on the Interstate to meet his biological father for his weekend visitation. The highway is very congested on Friday evenings, and that evening was no different. As I headed home, I was traveling in the left lane. The speed limit is 75, and I was going about 80. The truck in front of me changed to the right lane, which seemed to be opening up, so I followed. Suddenly he swerved back into the left lane, and there I was, twenty or thirty feet from a car-carrying 18-wheeler that lay sideways across the road. The left lane was jammed.

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Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. Heb. 13.2

Don’t you love the stories where a stranger knocks on the door to tell you just what you need to do to save a situation–or a life? I tell of several in A Book of Angels, one, around 1906, concerned a little girl dying of scarlet fever. She was so sick that her little coffin and white shroud was ready. One day a knock came at the door. The maid answered. “You can’t come in. The house is quarantined.”

“I’m a doctor,” said the stranger, giving his name and the township where he lived. “Go to the backyard and pluck a tail-feather from the rooster.” (In those days everyone kept chickens in their yards.) “Wrap the child’s throat in hot, wet flannel, and when she coughs, pull out the phlegm in her throat with the feather. She will live.” He went away, and the little girl’s father did as directed. She recovered. But that’s not all.

A few weeks later her father hitched up the horse and drove to the nearby town to thank the good doctor, only to be told that the man had died several years before. As for the little girl, to the end of her days, and she lived into her nineties, she kept the tiny shroud in which she should have been buried. And who was the doctor, an angel? A spirit? A guide?

Now a new story has come my way, about a war-refugee in Germany during the War.

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A few days ago I received an email from Davila (a stranger) writing in response to a story in A BOOK OF ANGELSof the Jamaican char who came into my dying mother’s hospital room and with a few words healed our relationship. I can’t do better than to print the whole email, and not only because the writer is so grateful. Here is her story of another healing angel: (Sorry I can’t find the tag on the new wordpress thingey that lets you choose to read on. Darn!)

Dear Sophy,

I have just begun reading A Book of Angels, and after a particular passage, I feel compelled to share this story:

My mother died this March 2, 2016. She and I were very close. On February 25 she was admitted to the ICU in the hospital with pancreatic cancer. She died seven days later in a beautiful hospice room. Even as I write this now I realize that today is March 25, exactly one month from that night she went in the ambulance.

The day we moved her from the hospital to a hospice a few miles away, my older brother and sister stood with my father discussing some details with the doctor. I stood by my mother’s hospital bed, crying, she opened her eyes, though she was heavily sedated, and I called my family back in to see. Her eyes rested on each of us, and she tried to speak to us but was unable to, because of the breathing tube. It was the last moment she was awake and looking at all of us together before she died, and it felt like a small miracle.

My family went on ahead in the car. I stayed with my mom. Just before the ambulance guys arrived to move her, a priest came in to give her a blessing. I am not Catholic, but I took some comfort in the prayers. But what soothed me more was the sturdy nun with deep chocolate brown skin and a smooth round face who walked in behind him. She came directly to me and stood quietly beside me. As the priest finished his blessing, the ambulance drivers arrived. I felt her beside me, and I wanted her there.

There was a flurry of straps and tubes and hospital machine noises as the nurse and paramedics moved my mother and her life support from one bed to another. I stood back, feeling helpless and lost without my mother. Then, at the same moment, the nun turned to me and I to her ,and she wrapped her broad arms around me, and rocked me like a little girl. It felt natural, like I had known her a long time. I started to sob.

“You’re the baby” she said. She had a thick Islander accent. “I lost my mother too” she said to me. “Its hard and you love her so.” As they began wheeling my mother out of the room, the nun let me go. She said more things quietly to me as we let go hands, but I don’t remember what they were. Only that I had a strong feeling that mother love is all around me. I remember thinking that phrase specifically, mother love.

She kept her gaze on me until I was out of sight. I remember noticing how no one in the hospital room had paid her any attention. Not even the priest. Her name was Zita.

How The Treasure of Montsegur came to me is another angelic story in itself. That story has resonated with me like no other I’ve read, and reading it led me to A Book of Angels. I am so thankful to you Sophy, for your beautiful writing. It has touched me with truths I will hold for the rest of my life.

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Dear Friends: LOOK! My book of poetry is being published in May. Here is the draft cover (with a few too many colons). I am so pleased, BUT…..

Finishing Line Press wants 100 pre-publication sales, and I am asking you out of friendship, curiosity, generosity, courtesy, and love of Words, to buy a copy – or two – or some to give away to friends.

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You rarely come across a truly miracle—so much is called imagination or explained as some twist of quarks or physics, but here’s one that happened to me just a few days ago.

I was on the Chunnel train traveling from London to Paris. I was underground, in fact deep underneath the English Channel, with tons of fathoms of water overhead, pressing on the tunnel itself (itself a sort of miracle, to my mind, and bless those engineers and workers who built it in such a way it doesn’t collapse under the weight of water, but that’s another story).

My cellphone had been dead for days, because though I had remembered to pack the charger, I had rather stupidly forgotten that I also needed the wall attachment that allows an American apparatus to plug into a European socket, and being too busy to buy an attachment, my cellphone’s power had slowly faded and died out. (I thought I might buy one when I got to Paris, and meanwhile, the phone was, after two days, quite black and dead.)

Suddenly it rang. I looked up from my book in astonishment, picked it up. “Hello?” The call was from my cousin’s friend, who informed me that she had to go out and would leave the key under a rock in a flowerpot in the courtyard . She gave me the door code and directions to get inside.

Then the phone again went dead. But when I arrived at eleven at night on a dark and empty street, I could thankfully find my way into the apartment. Blessing the angels that watch over us

Oh god! How foolish it all sounds in light of the bombing last night in Paris, the 160 people killed, the wounded, the horror–the horror–the senseless murders and lives ripped to pieces and the fear rippling through the air. Oh god, send angels to us in our helplessness. Write to me. Write to me. We need miracles now.

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Rest is not idleness, and to lie in the sun on a warm Spring day, listening to the rustle of the wind in the trees or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time. Alba, the cat.

There is a long tradition of writing from the point of view of an animal: Black Beauty, Watership Down, the Golden Ass by Apuleius—and also of writing about animals. I started considering a book about my cat Alba, when a friend at the National Geographic sent a letter to Alba from her cat Puma.
“What a great idea for a novel,” I thought and immediately started writing a cat novel in exchanged letters.

It didn’t work.

And then my beloved Alba died, and I began again. Curiously (a quality cats have plenty of), a totally new character leapt onto the page (Surprise!)– Continue reading →